


lovingly rendered in 3D.

by katarama



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Human, F/M, youtube au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-26
Updated: 2015-02-26
Packaged: 2018-03-15 07:52:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3439391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katarama/pseuds/katarama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles is a college student with a popular YouTube channel where he uploads videos of himself playing  video games.  He's known best for his colorful, rambling, meme-deriving commentary, although his editing skills are where he really shines, since he has to do so much of it.  When he stumbles across the channel of badass self-defense and fashion guru Allison Argent, he can't help but mention her in one of his videos.  </p><p>He keeps it in when he uploads the video because he's too tired to edit his all of his rambling out that night, and he ends up getting way more than he bargained for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lovingly rendered in 3D.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MissLouisa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissLouisa/gifts).



> For the Teen Wolf Rarepair Exchange.
> 
> Thanks again to my lovely beta, [rjosettes](http://archiveofourown.org/users/rjosettes/pseuds/rjosettes), for reassuring me and helping me wade through Teen Wolf canon timelines.
> 
> For the purposes of this fic, we're going to pretend that video responses are still a thing.
> 
> Enjoy!

“Hey, guys, this is Stiles, and for those of you who have been around long enough, you know that today is two years after I started this channel and put out my first video.  I think that’s pretty awesome; I don’t think I’ve stuck with very much for that long, with my attention span.  So, I decided I’d do something a little bit special.”

Stiles is sprawled out on the floor of his apartment, the tripod set up so the camera can record him, the TV, and the wall.  He looks and feels comfortable with his camera on, which is a feat that took about a year in and of itself.  He no longer gets the jitters when he flips the camera on and settles into place.  

He has a pattern down.  His messy pile of books and notes has been thrown haphazardly on the couch.  He can get to his work later, when he’s done filming.  He’s developed a sort of balance between work and his vlog (which mostly consists of him working on his vlog until it’s the last minute and he absolutely has to do his work).  He’s made sure the bags of chips and the empty pizza boxes have been cleared away from the background.  It took him two or three videos, in the beginning, before he figured out that that was a no-no.

“Scottie’s here, but don’t get yourselves too excited,” he says, grinning.  “I saw a lot of comments asking if the celebration for two years was you guys finally getting to see him in a video, but I’m still having fun drawing that out.  Not everyone gets to be a mysterious voice on the internet, and his crooked jawbone and stupid new tattoo might be a bit too much for you guys to deal with.  You all would be way too jealous of how hot my best friend is.”

Stiles shoots a glance at the table, where Scott is sitting with Kira.  “Awe, look at him, he’s blushing,” he says, even though Scott’s just shaking his head and smiling at Stiles.  His viewers don’t have to know that.  “I mean, you can’t actually look at him, I’m not going to show you him, but you can do the legwork there, yourselves.  Have fun imagining my hot, dorky, asthmatic best friend blushing.”

Scott’s voice gently reminds Stiles to get back to the point of his video, and Stiles beams.  “Right, two year anniversary, doing something different that isn’t Scott.  No doing Scott, that’s restricted to his girlfriend, guys, sorry.”  There’s a cough in the background, and Stiles pauses for a second to shoot Scott a sheepish glance.  “I know I’ve been working through zombie games, lately, and we still aren’t done with playing through Left 4 Dead.  I’ll get back to that, since I still have a lot of zombie ass to kick.  Today, though, I’m feeling pretty nostalgic, so, I hauled this out.”

Stiles moves his game console from behind the TV so that it’s visible in all its dark grey, dusty glory.  “For those of you too young to understand the beauty of this machine, this is a Nintendo 64.  It was the first gaming console I ever owned, and technically, Scott and I shared it.  We got it for Christmas when I was eight and he was nine, and I had to beg my dad for ages before he and Scott’s mom finally cracked.  Scott’s puppy dog eyes are a magical thing, and he doesn’t even realize he’s doing them.”  Stiles grabs his controller and plugs it into the console.  “They got us the console, two controllers, and a game each.  Neither of them knew anything about video games, so they asked the guy at the store.  As soon as Dad said I was eight, they sent him to look at the games for kids, like Pokémon Snap and all.  He claimed he was big on checking the ratings on games, back then, though we always snuck games that were for way older kids, anyway, and we never got in trouble.  But when he bought games for me, it was always the boring kid games.  Scott, though, had been hinting to his mom that getting Super Mario 64 would be, like, the coolest thing ever.  So, I got the Pokémon game and Scott got the fun one.  No offense to Pokémon, Scott and I had so many of those cards back when they had the cartoons on TV and we knew all the rules and everything.  But the game was really not very fun.”

“Anyway, we played Super Mario 64 together all the time,” Stiles says, holding up the cartridge for the camera.  “The Nintendo 64 always stayed over at Scott’s place, and we’d take turns playing, switching off every time we got a star.  We were both pretty obsessive about it, ninjaing down to play it in the middle of the night and getting caught by Scott’s parents every single time, because they knew we were going to do it.  It was a good thing that we kept it at Scott’s house, because he was honest, and he actually didn’t play unless we were both there.  If it were at mine, I totally would’ve been getting stars on my own, which would’ve been fun until Scott started looking at me like I was kicking kittens for playing without him."

Stiles puts the cartridge in.  “Anyway, you guys don’t want to hear me ramble on about Super Mario, you want to see me play it.  I haven’t played it in a really long time, since I just dug out the 64 when I went home over break, but I figured two years on this channel was a good enough excuse to bring it out and maybe work back up to kicking ass again.  So, here it is, Stiles plays Super Mario 64.  Enjoy!”

After getting through a few of the easier stars, loaded with more color commentary than the average person could get from a video game designed to be okay for kids to play, Stiles turns the camera, TV, and console off and calls it a day.  He’s decided that he’s going to mix things up, a bit, from now on, doing multiple games at once instead of just playing through one at a time.  It might build up the anticipation, and he doesn’t mind the variety. 

“You done for the day?” Scott asks, and Stiles stands up.  He stretches, groaning.  He can get a bit obsessive when he’s playing video games, and he always loses track of how long he’s been sitting in the same position.  When he plays video games, it’s one of the few times when he feels like he can actually focus on something, though Scott has told him that’s because he does not get any less enthusiastically physical when he’s playing.

“Yeah,” Stiles responds.  “I’m going to do some editing this afternoon, but I should be good to get this out by tomorrow night.”

“You always edit out the good parts,” Scott says mildly.

“Scott, they don’t want to hear me sit there and curse like a sailor for three hours straight,” Stiles says, rolling his eyes.  This isn’t the first time they’ve had this discussion, and he’s still determined to blatantly miss the point. 

“You always edit out the emotional parts,” Scott presses, his face the perfect picture of earnestness, “and you didn’t even get all that emotional in this one.  You could’ve said a lot more about back when we got the Nintendo 64.  I liked what you said, and it’s not like you said a lot, so I don’t think you need to cut so much.”

Stiles sighs.  “Look, dude, I’ll cut as much as I need to.  Viewers are like me, they only have so much attention span before they get bored, and they watch my videos because I’m hilarious, not because I go on and on and on about sappy stuff that no one cares about.”

“People care,” Scott disagrees, and Stiles rolls his eyes, not even deigning it with a response.  He gets the camera off the tripod and grabs his computer from the sofa, walking them over to the table and sitting next to Scott.  Things are silent as Stiles boots up his computer.

“You can cut the part about my crooked jawbone,” Scott finally allows, and Stiles takes it for the peace offering it is.

“I’m not gonna cut the crooked jawbone bit,” Stiles says.  “That was gold.”

Scott groans.

 

* * *

 

Stiles goes to his classes, most of the time.  He can’t be guaranteed to stay awake through all of them, especially when he’s been up really late doing homework or stuff for his channel (or keeping Scott up goofing off until they’re both droopy-eyed on the couch, and even Stiles’ energy is drained).  He’s nudged awake when he does start to doze, because he tends to take classes with his friends.  

He still hasn’t quite made his mind up yet about what he wants to study.  He figures taking an odd assortment of classes that his friends are in will at least keep his GPA up, even if it means he’s a first semester sophomore with absolutely no idea what major he is going to declare in less than three months. 

Scott is trudging through genetics in the hopes of making his internship with Deaton count for something.  He wants to go to veterinary school, and he’s assured Stiles that that requires a science-y degree.  He flip-flopped back and forth between genetics and chemistry before deciding that genetics was more fun.  Stiles was a bit disappointed, because he used signing up for chemistry classes with Scott as an excuse to have Lydia Martin in class with him again.  He knows it is a terrible reason to take a science class, but he thinks that his high level of appreciation for Lydia talking about science will be enough to get him to actually pay attention to class. 

Scott’s girlfriend and their third roommate, Kira, has been dead set on history since Scott met her first year, first semester.  She says she got into learning about the history of her culture because of her mom, but Stiles thinks that there’s a good deal of her dad in the decision, too.  Her dad is a professor, and Stiles has seen the way he lights up when he starts getting into the good stuff.  Kira is really not all that different.  She gets excited about things in a way that Stiles can really empathize with.  They all do, really.  It’s one of the reasons that none of them had many friends back in high school.  Stiles suspects it’s the reason that Scott found Kira in the first place; dorks apparently come in packs, and Scott seems to be a magnet for them.

If having two close friends can really be counted a pack.  Stiles thinks it does.  It’s one more close friend than he had for most of his life, and he thinks that counts for something.

 

* * *

 

Stiles gets out of class in the afternoon and walks home to find Kira and Scott huddled around the computer together at the table.  They’re both watching something, and Stiles figures it must be interesting, because they barely even notice him coming in.  He goes to his room and sets down his books before crowding into their space to see.  Kira isn’t even fazed anymore when Stiles pushes head-first towards the screen.

There’s a YouTube video pulled up which Stiles has missed the first minute and a half of, so he doesn’t really know what’s going on.  The room is dim, though, and there are red solo cups everywhere.  The sound and image quality aren’t the best, so Stiles figures that it was probably taken on a cell phone.

“What is this?” he asks Kira and Scott.  Kira shushes him and tells him to watch.  Stiles actually zips his lips, because it becomes obvious pretty quickly that no matter how loud they turn up the sound on the computer, they can only make out some of what is being said over the loud music and background noise.

In the center of the frame (most of the time, the camera isn’t very steady) is a tall, curly-haired brunette.  She’s chatting animatedly with someone out of the frame when a shorter guy with lots of hair comes up behind her.  Stiles isn’t sure if she knows him or not, but one second he’s reaching out to put his hands on her hips and the next second he’s on the floor.

“Holy shit,” Stiles says, his eyes wide.  From the sudden spike in noise from the camera, he knows he’s not the only one reacting that way.  

The camera’s image blurs as it tries to follow the girl as she rushes over to the guy.  She says something to him that the camera is too far away to pick up, and she reaches out her hand to help him up.  He refuses, and she only gets more flustered.

The footage cuts off.

“Holy shit,” Stiles repeats.  “What was _that_?”

“A vlogger,” Kira replies, finally scooting over so that Stiles’ elbow isn’t nestled uncomfortably against her neck and he can sit down between them.  

 

* * *

 

Stiles can’t leave it at that, naturally.  He does some quick googling about the video to figure out that, technically, when the video was taken, the girl (Allison, her name is Allison) wasn’t a vlogger yet.  Apparently, someone she knew put the video up online last year, and it went viral.  With the number of views it has, Stiles doesn’t know how he missed it.

From there, finding Allison’s YouTube account is pretty simple.  She’s big enough that she has her own wikipedia page, though there isn’t much information there.

Stiles decides that maybe it is time for some empirical research, so he goes to watch some of her videos.  He realizes quickly that he’s only actually interested in about two thirds of them; Allison seems to have transitioned relatively early on from doing strictly self-defense-y videos to splitting her time between that and fashion videos.  

Four days later, Stiles has watched every single one of the videos on self-defense and martial arts and gymnastics and weapons (family business, apparently) and has even watched a good chunk of the fashion videos.  Most of them seem to address comments viewers made about things that she did with her hair or makeup or clothes in videos.  She does a lot of tutorials about hair stuff, especially, like how to keep hair from going flat when working out and how to do her hair so it stays out of her eyes when she’s doing gymnastics or moving around a lot.  He doesn’t learn much that is applicable to him from those videos, but he watches them anyway, partly because he’s interested in her slightly unconventional filming angles and editing techniques and partly because apparently watching people braid hair is a little bit relaxing.  

The fact that she’s a very attractive person when she’s not blurry and grainy has nothing to do with it, obviously.

Stiles is lucky that Scott and Kira both have the patience of saints, because he drags them over to watch more videos than he’d care to admit.  A lot of her videos are just really, really cool.  She doesn’t have other people in her videos very often, though she’ll sometimes have a friend volunteer for demonstrations.  Stiles learns a lot from watching her, and he retains a surprising amount of it, for a YouTube binge watch.

So a week later, when he has the camera on while he plays a brand new game Scott gave him, it isn’t all that surprising when he learns a new move and blurts out, “Hey, it’s like that thing Allison did in her latest video!”

It _is_ surprising when he finishes the editing and leaves it in for the final cut of the video.  

 

* * *

 

He uploads the video late at night, when he’s too tired to look at it anymore.  He’s been working on it for a while because he was feeling more talkative than usual that day, and there was a lot to edit out.  He feels like he’s done all he can, though, and he figures his viewers won’t mind it if he talks just a little bit more than normal.  He doesn’t bother waiting for the notifications to start coming in before he shuts down his computer and goes to bed.

The next morning, he sleeps through his alarm and almost doesn’t get to class on time.  He rushes from class to lunch and then to class again, and it isn’t until he sits down in the evening that he gets the chance to scan through the comments.  Two years after he started, he still reads the comments.  Half of them are mildly offensive, and the other half are shouty, so he feels like it’s really a masochistic exercise, but he always does it anyway.  He likes knowing what his viewers think, and being on the internet has made his skin a bit thicker, anyway.  He knows what to expect by this point.

He doesn’t expect what he sees that day.

There are way too many notifications and comments for him to sift through in one sitting, and he already has a video response.  He pops in his earbuds and opens the video in a new tab to load on his crappy, overstrained internet while he scans through comments.

“My followers directed me to this video, and I thought it was pretty cool.  You don’t have it _quite_ right, though, Stiles,” a now-familiar, female voice says, and Stiles almost drops his laptop on the floor.  He rushes to switch tabs as quickly as he can, and when he sees a smiling face and dark brown, curly hair, he feels like he could melt into a puddle on the floor.

It takes him a few minutes to realize that Allison is still talking, and that he hasn’t been paying a single bit of attention to the words she’s been saying.  He backs up the video to the beginning again and watches.  When she’s done introducing the video, Allison pulls her hair back and imitates the video game move almost perfectly.  She explains the differences between that move and what she showed in the video Stiles mentioned, saying that it’s an easy mistake to make.  It’s a very instructive video, but Stiles can’t help but focus on whether she had to practice the moves before she filmed them or whether she just got them down pat on the first try.  With how quickly the video was put up, he figures it’s very likely it is all impromptu, but it doesn’t look like she is even breaking a sweat.  He couldn’t really tell the difference if she was totally fucking things up, but her movements are so fluid and natural and graceful that he thinks she probably isn’t entirely human, and that she is some sort of perfect robot that gets everything right on the first try.  She definitely has that air of put together and hypercompetent that Stiles could not imitate if he tried.

Allison admits at the end that she doesn’t really play video games, and that only makes Stiles more blown away; she doesn’t do video games, but she still clearly watched his video carefully enough that she was able to offer such an in-depth explanation.  The video ends and Stiles watches it again and again, partly because Allison _said his name_ (and really, he’s been doing this for a while now, people know who he is, one additional person knowing him shouldn’t be a big deal) and partly because it is a pretty cool video.  

Stiles shoves his computer at Scott and Kira to make them watch.

 

* * *

 

After the high of having a video response from Allison finally starts to wear off, Stiles realizes he should probably respond.  He debates making a response video to her response video, but he decides against it; he doesn’t have the time to make and edit a video just for this when he’s already behind filming the next one he’s actually scheduled to release for his channel.

He feels like he needs to say something, though, because he is actually literally incapable of not saying anything.  He spends almost an hour and writes about five drafts of a private message before he finally settles on something he thinks is pretty dorky, but most likely inoffensive and less embarrassing than any of his previous attempts.

“Hey Allison!

I saw your video, which I was really stunned to get, by the way.  It figures we had some overlapping viewers, though, with both of us being so good at kicking ass.  Kicking virtual ass counts, right?  I could not kick a real life ass half as well as you do.  I’m more about using sarcasm to mask the fact that I’m not exactly the most intimidating person ever.  

Anyway, it was really awesome to see that you watched the video and it was cool to get your feedback.  I’ll definitely think of that video every time I play that game, now, which will be for a while, since it’s taking me way too long to beat it.  That’s what you get for tackling new games on-camera, right?  

I love your videos, and it was awesome to hear you appreciated mine.

Stiles”

He debates going back and fixing it again before he decides that he would just send himself into a spiral of editing and re-editing until he got distracted and talked himself out of sending anything at all.  So he pushes the send button and closes out, hoping that the tab not being open will mean that he’ll obsessively check it slightly less.

He obsessively checks it anyway for the full day before she responds.  Every time there’s a new message, he gets his hopes up, only to look and see that it’s someone he doesn’t know, or a friend passing along links for him to watch.  He checks in one of his classes in the early afternoon, because it’s an intro level class, anyway, so it’s not like the professor gives a single fuck about whether the students are on their phones.

When there’s a response, he has to keep himself from jumping out of his seat.  Her answer is short but friendly (or at least polite; with Stiles it could be either).  Stiles fails at waiting before the class ends to respond, even though he knows that it probably makes him look pathetic and a little bit desperate (and definitely makes his class notes suffer).  

He feels marginally better when, two minutes later, there’s a response sitting in his inbox.

 

* * *

 

It starts a pattern.

Every day during Stiles’ early morning class, they message.  Every other day during what he soon learns is Allison’s early afternoon French class, they message more.  Stiles is a bit surprised by that; Allison seems very academically focused, and not like the type to be chill with messaging him in the middle of class.  He finds out later that it’s because the course is a lower-level speaking course required for the French major she’s slowly edging towards, and that she’s fluent.  They start messaging outside of class, though, too.  Every night around 11, they start messaging before Allison goes to bed, because she (unlike Stiles) seems to have an actual, regular, reasonable sleeping schedule.  

Starting out, their conversations mostly revolve around making videos.  They talk about filming schedules and gripe about fans who sometimes don’t understand that youtube vloggers have lives, too, and can’t be uploading 24/7.  Stiles insists that it’s a good thing.  He says it would only be a matter of time before the constant exposure to his voice would drive people insane, like in one of those bad sci-fi shows he used to watch with Scott when he was younger.  Allison claims she has the opposite problem; she tells Stiles that she would run out of things to say, and she jokes that she can’t punch everything, she’d lose all her friends.  Stiles jokes that there are plenty of people online that would pay to see her actually flat out punch him, and that if she ran out of people to punch, he’d be a solid option, maybe even a willing volunteer if she promised to avoid the nuts.

 

* * *

 

Stiles starts to work their conversations into his daily routine.  Go to class, unpack his books, check his messages, take a few notes.  Glance under the desk to see if Allison has replied.  Thank every deity he has read about in a delirious late-night wiki binge for Allison somehow being a morning person.  End up with very mediocre notes and rely on the fact that the professor sticks very strictly to the textbook.

He’s had people that he’s talked to online before.  Even before he was putting out videos, he would pop in at chatrooms and join so many forums that he would get his usernames and passwords mixed up and have to go back to his registration emails to find them.  He sunk into LJ and Reddit way too hard.  

He’s never had anyone quite like Allison, though.  On paper, they don’t have much in common.  She definitely isn’t the kind of person he’d run into every day online.  But the more they talk and the better he gets to know her, the more he realizes that she gets him.  He mentions that he has no idea what he wants to study, still, and that he might give up and go with something like criminal justice and follow his dad’s footsteps.  Allison says she’s expected to do French or business, French because of their family’s history and business because she’s supposed to take over the family company when she gets old enough.  She’s not really enthusiastic about either, but she doesn’t have any better alternatives to toss out.  She deeply understands the need he has to not be a disappointment and to live up to expectations.  Stiles worries about Allison sometimes, because at least he just has to not disappoint Scott and his dad, who know Stiles and have relatively low expectations.  It seems like Allison’s parents expect a lot more, and Stiles doesn’t understand how she isn’t buckling under all of that stress.

Stiles thinks that maybe she kept up archery and martial arts and all that stuff in college for a reason, and it wasn’t just to keep her daddy happy.

Two months go by, and Stiles starts to figure out that there’s more of a pattern to their conversations than just the times when they talk.  Certain conversations come with certain times of the day.  In the early morning it’s easy to ramble about how waking up sucks and have Allison respond that drowning in coffee is not actually healthy and Stiles really should take better care of his body and to respond that professors with monotone voices would be restricted to mid-morning classes if the college was actually promoting student health, because there’s no other way to get through that class than with coffee.  Allison is always awake and put together, but Stiles is grumpy or groggy or both.  

Late at night is when they always have their important conversations.  Stiles has realized that when Allison is up late, it’s usually because she is stressed or lonely or both.  She has her best friend and roommate, and it seems like Allison goes to her most when she has something important that she needs to talk about.  She starts to talk to Stiles, though, too.  She tells Stiles how much she misses her mom.  She tells Stiles that she hasn’t seen her mom since the divorce, and isn’t sure she wants to.  

Stiles breaks down and tells her about his mom.  It’s easier on the screen than it is out loud.  He can write it all out at once and send it at once in a very minimized way, so it doesn’t come out haltingly and his grief isn’t quite so obvious.  It’s a story he doesn’t tell often; at least, not in a way that shows how heavy it still weighs on him and his dad.  Allison handles it better than Stiles expects.  He gets no trite, cliche reassurances.  So he unloads.  He tells her about how sick his mom got and how hard it was on them.  He tells the part of the story he left out of the anniversary video, how his dad and Melissa only agreed to get them the video game console because it was an excuse to get Stiles over at Scott’s house while his dad was drinking after his mom died.  Stiles’ dad and Scott’s mom would organize sleepovers so Stiles wouldn’t be stuck sad and alone with his grieving, drinking dad.  Video games became a nice, fun distraction for both him and Scott.  

They played the entire night after Scott’s dad left, just silently mashing buttons until Scott was ready to talk.  Stiles doesn’t tell Allison that part.

Allison is quiet for a long time, and Stiles worries that he’s said too much.  He didn’t plan to overload her with so much heavy stuff late at night, and he worries that he freaked her out.  Finally she responds, a simple, “That must have been very hard on you, Stiles.  Thank you for telling me that.”  It isn’t much, but it makes Stiles feel so much lighter.  It’s not empty platitudes.  It’s something soft and gentle and Stiles can feel that Allison means it.

“I feel like I can trust you enough to tell you that kind of stuff,” Stiles types after a long moment of rereading the response over and over in his head.  

“Me, too.”

They _both_ stay up way too late that night, for once.  Stiles knows he’ll hate everything in the morning.   He can’t regret it, though, because that night he falls asleep feeling warm and settled and happy.

 

* * *

 

Stiles is subscribed to Allison’s channel, and he’s set notifications to warn him when Allison posts a new video.  He likes not having to check Allison’s channel, because whenever he does, he ends up going down a video-watching wormhole.  He’s seen all of her videos, but he has favorites, and they’re always worth a rewatch.  He has her posting schedule down pat pretty quickly, both from talking to her about it and from keeping track of updates, but he likes that jump of excitement that comes with the notification.  It’s about as great as it used to be getting an email from mail services saying he had a package waiting for him, back when he lived in the dorms with Scott and actually used campus mail.  It was always his dad or Mrs. McCall, and he always knew the package was coming, but just getting the email was exciting.

It’s Wednesday at lunch time when he actually gets the notification.  He’s at lunch with Cora, and in theory, they’re doing work together.  They’re in a class that requires a group project and they both figured it was easier to work with someone they already knew.  Neither of them actually wants to get work done, but midterm essays are coming up for the class, and Cora announced that they at least needed to pretend to be productive.  Neither of them are very good at pretending.  Both of them eat slowly while Cora messes around on her phone, her headphones plugged in and an earbud in one ear.  Stiles checks his phone, and when he sees that the new video is up, he drags his laptop out of his bag and pulls up the link to load the video.  He doesn’t have his headphones on him, but he figures that the diner is empty enough that no one would really complain.  

Cora gives him a strange look when she hears the noise of Allison talking.  She pulls the earbud out of her ear.  “What’s that?”

Stiles shushes her so he can watch the video.  Cora moves the laptop so they can both see the screen, in spite of Stiles’ loud protest.

“Who’s that?” she asks.  Stiles is torn between shushing her again and answering.  The determined look on her face tells him that she’s not going to wait for answers, and he doesn’t want her talking through the whole video, so he pauses it.

“A Youtuber.  She does self-defense and makeup stuff.  She got famous for taking a dude down at a party and going viral, but most of her videos don’t actually involve punching people, and just offer tips she’s learned about staying safe and stuff.  She shows off moves when they look cool, but they’re stuff that normal people can learn.”

“I’m surprised they let her drag all her filming stuff into one of our brand new workout rooms,” Cora comments.  “They just finished putting in that floor a month ago, they probably don’t want a tripod scuffing that up.  Though, I guess if she doesn’t get caught, all the more power to her.”

Stiles is about to explain that the tripod probably isn’t going to be moving around, since Allison takes care of her equipment and only tripods like her old, janky one that she started out with need you to move the tripod to change the camera angle when it sinks in what she said.  “Wait, our workout room?  As in, like, a Hale workout room?”

“No, dumbass,” Cora says, rolling her eyes.  “If she was working out in our house, I’d know who she was.  Have you seriously never been in the sports center workout rooms?”

“The sports center workout rooms.  As in, the college’s workout rooms.”

“Yes,” Cora says.  “The workout rooms in the sports center of the college you go to.  The sports center with workout rooms that you apparently have never been in.”

“Holy shit,” Stiles says.  He opens a new tab with Allison’s channel and clicks on an earlier video.  He waits until a workout room with mats is shown.  “Is this what it looked like before it was renovated?”

“Yeah,” Cora says.  “It was a shitty workout room.  Most of the machines were way too old to be used, and it was sort of a depressing place to work out.”

“Holy shit,” Stiles repeats.  He’s starting to feel like a broken record.  “Cora, Allison is using the workout room here.  For her to be using the workout room here, she needs a student ID.  You need a student ID to get into the sports center, and she films her own videos.  That means she’s getting herself into the building, which means she has a student ID here, which means that she goes here.”

Cora looks at him like he’s grown a second head.  “You’re getting really worked up about this, for just a random Youtuber.”

“No, but you don’t understand,” Stiles tells her, his words stumbling over each other to get out of his mouth.  “Allison is my friend, and we’ve been talking for ages now and she is really smart and funny and her videos are great and _she goes to the same school as me_.”

“Talk to her about it, then,” Cora says, like it’s obvious.  Stiles doesn’t understand how she could possibly be so calm in the face of Allison being _on his campus right that very minute_ , but he figures that Cora just doesn’t understand the significance of this.  After all, she didn’t know who Allison was until a few minutes ago.

“I can’t just talk to her,” Stiles says.  “What if she thinks it’s creepy?  What if she thinks I’m stalking her?  What if she stops talking to me because she thinks I’m stalking her?  What if-”

“Stop,” Cora says, cutting Stiles off.  Stiles stops.  He thinks that her tone would be much less effective if she weren’t a Hale.  They do this thing with their faces when they want you to do something that is a little bit terrifying, and absolutely a family trait.  “I thought you said you two were friends.  If you’re really that close…”

Stiles wants to argue with that logic, but it does sound a little bit more reasonable than he’d like to admit.  “We’re online friends.  We talk online.  Things might get weird if I try to organize meeting up, and I don’t want that.  The last thing I want is to risk what we have now.”

“Your call.  I think you’re being silly, but whatever.”  She turns the computer back to Stiles and puts her headphones in both ears.

Stiles doesn’t get any work done the rest of the afternoon.

 

* * *

 

Stiles talks himself in circles for three days straight.  He asks Kira and Scott what they think, and both of them agree with Cora.  Stiles isn’t too sure that he agrees, and he feels a bit uncomfortable with being so overwhelmingly outnumbered.  Objectively, he thinks they’re probably right, but he also knows that none of them has ever been in his shoes and none of them actually know Allison.

He doesn’t sleep much during those days, and in a sleep-deprivation-fueled act of rashness, he decides to message her about it before they both go to bed.

“Hey, so there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

Allison shoots back a response quickly.  “Is everything okay?”

“It’s not that kind of talk.  I was watching your new video the other day with a friend of mine, and she said that the workout room you were in looked familiar.”

“It did?”

Stiles holds his breath as he types.  “Yeah.  It’s from our school.  My school.”

The silence from the other end is long enough to make him extremely uncomfortable.  He starts trying to think of ways to backtrack, ways he can pretend it was all a joke, haha, what, Allison didn’t find it funny?  He showed too many of his cards, and he’s starting to freak out.

“Wait, where do you go to school?”

Stiles tells her, a seed of hope in his chest.  If she’s asking, that means she wants to know, and she isn’t way creeped out.  They’d always been so careful to avoid specifics, in the past, although they have both hovered close to saying things.  Neither of them wanted to be the one to break that barrier and make things uncomfortable, and now Allison is asking, and there is a real chance that Stiles’ answer could matter.

“Oh my god,” is Allison’s immediate reply, and before Stiles can respond, he has another message in his inbox.  “We go to the same college.”

“I live off-campus, or I would say we live on the same campus.”

“I live off-campus, too.  My roommate didn’t like the dorms,” Allison messages him.

Stiles is practically vibrating.  “We go to the same college, though.  We go to class in the same set of buildings.  We could’ve passed each other in the halls and never realized it.”  He knows they haven’t; he would recognize Allison walking by in a heartbeat.  The sentiment is there, though.  “This is ridiculous.  Like, this is not even real life.  This shit does not happen in real life.”

“Apparently it does to us,” Allison responds.

Stiles is afraid to take the plunge and push this even further.  He knows that processing even that much is probably a lot for Allison, and he doesn’t feel like he should jump straight to them meeting up, even though it’s what he wants.  Luckily, she takes care of it for him.

“We should grab lunch in the student center.  You have Thursday afternoon free, right?”  

Stiles is so excited he loses his balance and almost falls off the couch during his victory fistpump.  He has zero chill and he doesn’t even care.  “Yes.  Oh my god.  I am so glad you brought it up, because I really wanted to do that but did not want to be creepy.  I actually had a little mini-breakdown to my roommates about it.  But I definitely want to meet up, and Thursday I have nothing going on for lunch.  So, yeah.  I’m game.”

“Me too.”  

Stiles’ grin is so wide he feels like his face is practically splitting open and probably a little bit creepy looking, but he doesn’t even care.  “11:45, then?  Meet by the weird-ass wolf statue?”

“I’ll write it in my calendar.”

 

* * *

 

There are a lot of days between then and Thursday.  Stiles and Allison still talk during that time, but Stiles feels like he’s probably projecting a million tons of nervousness even in their everyday relationships.  Now that he’s actually going to meet Allison, it’s easy to get anxious about it.  Allison already knows what he looks like, from his videos, and she already knows that he’s incapable of shutting up.  She has an idea of his personality from talking to him online.  He still can’t help but worry that Allison is going to get there and realize he’s dorkier than she thought or discover that he is not cool at all and not worth her time.  He seriously doubts that Allison would think that way, but it doesn’t stop him from being terrified at the idea of Allison cutting off communication because she realizes that he’s not all that badass or exciting, like she is.

When Thursday actually comes, Cora makes the mistake of pointing out to him that he’s assuming a lot and that he might not even have anything to worry about, because Allison might not even show up.  Stiles sinks into a tailspin after that; he doesn’t think he could handle that kind of blatant rejection, and now he’s terrified of it.  He can’t stop fidgeting through his morning class, tapping his fingers against the desk and shifting his weight to try and get comfortable and sucking on the cap of his pen, and he’s pretty sure he’s driving Cora absolutely bonkers, because she has very little patience for his inability to sit still in the first place, but he can’t help it.  When class finally ends, she tells him to hurry up and go meet his girlfriend.  

Stiles would correct her, but he feels a little bit like he is going to throw up, and it’s sort of not his priority.

The walk to the student center is only five minutes, but it feels like the longest five minutes in Stiles’ life.  He keeps imagining all the different ways things could go wrong.  Allison could not show up, just like Cora suggested.  Stiles could be standing there next to that dumb wolf statue for a half an hour waiting for her only for her to not come at all.  She could come but not really care about Stiles and tell him to fuck off and leave her alone.  She could realize Stiles is sort of the worst at interacting with other human beings that are not Scott and Kira.  The number of ways that things could go wrong is endless, and Stiles is pretty sure he’s thought of most of them.

When he enters the building and climbs up to the second floor, there’s already a surprisingly tall person with brown, curly standing next to the statue.  Stiles says Allison’s name when he gets closer, and she turns and beams at him.  “Hi Stiles!”

Stiles is pretty sure he melts into a relieved heap on the floor.  She’s beaming so brightly and her eyes are so pretty and sparkly (honestly, Stiles was pretty sure only Disney princesses had eyes that sparkly, he didn’t think that was a thing in real life) and she looks so happy to see Stiles.  It’s surreal.

“Heya Allison,” Stiles says, still stunned but smiling, too.  

“You hungry?” she asks, gesturing towards a restaurant.

Stiles smiles sheepishly.  “I’m always hungry.  I could probably eat a horse right now.  Except not, like, an actual, literal horse, because I’m not into that, but you get what I mean.”

Allison’s laugh is high and bright, and it warms Stiles from the inside.  “I don’t think they have horse here, anyway.  You’ll have to settle for chicken.”

“Chicken works for me,” Stiles says.  “Lead the way.”

 

* * *

 

“She’s amazing,” Stiles says, sprawled out on the living room floor in as dramatic of a fashion as he can manage.  “She’s like… she probably stole sunshine and has been hiding it somewhere so she could draw on it and beam people in the face when she smiles.  She sat there and talked to me for two whole hours.  I gave her an out and everything, but she stayed until she had to go to class.  Who actually wants to talk to me for that long?  Nobody, that’s who.”

Scott stretches his leg away from the couch so he can nudge Stiles with his foot.  “So it went okay?”

“God, it was great,” Stiles says dreamily.  “She didn’t make disapproving faces at me when I ate like Cora does, and she was really funny.  Like, the kind of funny where you don’t feel like they’re making fun of you.  Like, the kind of funny you are.  She is Scott funny.  And also probably not that much shorter than you, and she has the brown hair, brown eyes thing, too.  But I’m pretty sure she could take on like… a whole pack of werewolves by herself, or something, which, let’s be honest, you’d probably need me out there with you and we’d both be running and end up dead because you dropped your inhaler.”

“When would we need to fight a pack of werewolves?” Scott asks, perplexed.

“It doesn’t matter, Scott,” Stiles insists, “the point is that she could do it alone, because she is a little bit terrifying.  Gorgeous and sweet, but a little bit terrifying.”

Scott just smiles.  “If you say so, dude.”

“I didn’t spill anything on myself or her and she didn’t tell me not to talk to her anymore and she was there before I was but didn’t have to wait long.  We’re grabbing lunch again this weekend.  I didn’t fuck anything up.”

“That’s really awesome, dude,” Scott says.  “You should invite her over sometime to meet the rest of us.”

“I don’t want to scare her off first thing by inviting her back to my place,” Stiles says.  “That sounds like the beginning of a horror movie, and we’ve only met once.”

“Soon, then,” Scott says.  “Kira would love to meet her.”

“I’ll try for soon.”

 

* * *

 

Allison and Stiles go out for lunch a few more times.  They still talk pretty much every day online, but now they’ll also grab food between class and hang out and talk in person, too.  Things are going well, and Stiles is optimistic that they can be considered in the beginning stages of the real life friendship.  They have inside jokes they are comfortable with bringing up out loud, which blows Stiles’ mind a little bit.  In hindsight, he feels like he shouldn’t be so surprised, but it still catches him off guard every time Allison smiles that cute, dimpled, affectionate smile of hers.  Making her smile is almost as rewarding as making Scott proud.

One time, when he’s staring at her smile, Stiles blurts out that she’s gotta meet Scott and Kira.  He thinks she would fit right in with them, though he teases that Scott and Kira are both way bigger geeks than she is, and she’d have to be prepared for that.  He expects her to be weird about it, but she not only takes it in stride, she seems totally on board with the idea.  Stiles clears a date with his roommates and invites Allison over for lunch.

Things actually start out great.  Stiles takes lead on making lunch, since Allison is his friend, and he’s got the most cooking experience, anyway.  He expects that lunch will be running late, and is pleasantly surprised when he has lunch done ten minutes before when she’s supposed to come.  He figures that Allison will be perfectly on time, or even slightly on the early side.  She tends to be a very punctual person.

At 11:45, the door alarm doesn’t go off.  Stiles’ phone doesn’t go off, either.  Stiles would know, since he obsessively taps the screen of his phone as soon as it goes dim to check the time.  He starts to get a little bit anxious, just when he thought he could finally start to relax.  Lunch was finished and Scott stole a little bit and said that it tasted good.  He knows it is something that she likes, because he checked with her, first, after he sent his ‘do you have any dietary restrictions I should know about’ message.  

Now he has another long list of things that to worry about.  He worries that it was too much too quickly, and she got anxious about meeting his friends and bailed.  He doesn’t think Allison would be that scared of other human beings, or would duck out without letting him know, but it could happen.  She could have just not cared at all, or forgotten, or something.  Her schedule could have gotten really full and she could have forgotten to cancel.  

Scott tries to convince him to be a bit more reasonable.  She could have gotten lost on the way up to his apartment, or accidentally gone to the wrong building.  She could have gotten out of class late, or have some other totally justifiable and reasonable reason for getting there a little bit late besides the horrible circumstances that Stiles is dreaming up.

Kira points out that Allison is Stiles’ friend, and that she wouldn’t just bail on him when she knew it was something important to him without at least letting him know.  Stiles can’t argue that point without sounding ridiculous even to himself, and it helps loosen the knot in his chest a little bit, though he can’t help waking his phone up again and again and again.

At noon, the door finally buzzes, and Stiles runs to let Allison up.  He can’t describe the amount of relief he feels, though he feels silly about it.  He really wants Allison to meet his friends, and he planned so much for her coming to visit.  He would be crushed if she didn’t show.

Scott wanted to run straight up to her right off the bat, but Kira suggested they hang back a bit to give Allison space when she walks in the door.  It turns out to have been a good call on Kira’s part, because when Allison finally knocks on the apartment door and Stiles opens it way too quickly, Allison looks downright frazzled.  Her hair is up in a messy bun and she’s sweating and wearing workout clothes.  Her backpack is swung over one shoulder, the collar of her jacket squashed under the strap.

“I’m so sorry,” Allison starts, her voice rushed and breathless.  “I’ve had the craziest morning ever, and I meant to text you I was going to be late, but--”

“It’s totally fine,” Stiles says reassuringly.  Scott and Kira share a knowing look over his shoulders, but he ignores them.  “We’ve been keeping lunch warm, and I don’t have class this afternoon, so we have plenty of time.”

When she comes in and notices Scott and Kira, she’s even more apologetic.  She tells them that she’s been looking forward to meeting them both and admits that she hoped to make a much better impression, but Scott is nothing if not reassuring.  Allison gets hugs from both Scott and Kira.  She jokingly protests that she’ll get them gross and sweaty, so Scott has to double-check first that she is actually okay with hugs before he gives her one.

After the nerve wracking start, Stiles is really happy when things actually start to fit together.  Although Kira gets a little bit flustered and shy around new people and Scott gets a little bit overly enthusiastic, Allison handles it all really well.  She tells them about her long, frustrating day; she was about to change for school after working out when the fire alarm in the building went off from some dumbass on the first floor of her apartment building burning toast.  She had just enough time to grab her books for class and go, but she didn’t have any buffer time after class, either, because she had an exam that her professor told them should not take the full time but that every single person in her class stayed twenty minutes late to finish.  She ran the entire way to Stiles’ apartment building.

Things are warm and comfortable and friendly, and Stiles is pleased by the lack of awkwardness in the conversations.  Stiles and Scott never run out of things to talk about, and Stiles and Allison are to the point where either of them can salvage stilted, awkward conversation with a laugh and some redirection to things they both like.  The conversation speeds along through the first half of lunch.

They’re having an intense discussion about which of them was in a worse freshman dorm when Allison’s phone goes off.  She quickly apologizes and excuses herself from the table to go into the living room to take the call.  They can’t hear most of the conversation, but Stiles catches an, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry I forgot,” before Allison pops back into the kitchen, phone still in hand.

“I was supposed to leave a notebook for my roommate to pick up this morning, but I totally spaced,” Allison explains to Stiles.  “She needs it for her next class.”

“Oh,” Stiles says, a little disappointed.  “It’s okay if you need to leave to take care of that.”

“Actually,” Allison says tentatively, “she suggested coming here to get it.  Would that be okay?”

Stiles visibly perks back up.  “Yeah, that’s totally cool!  I know she’ll have to go to class, but since you met my people, I can meet your people now!  Or, at least, your person.”

“Sounds good to me,” Scott agrees.  

Allison beams.  “Okay, then I’m just going to go let her know.”  

 

* * *

 

When she gets back, they finish up their meal and do the dishes, which Stiles tells Allison on no uncertain terms that she’s not allowed to help with, since she’s a guest.  Stiles is putting away the last of the pans when the door buzzes, and Kira runs to let the roommate in.

“I’m so, so sorry,” Stiles hears Allison say.  “I meant to drop it off, but there was a fire alarm and-”

“It isn’t your fault that there are people in our building so incompetent they can’t make toast,” a very, very familiar voice says, and Stiles’ stomach drops.  “You look like you had a rough morning.  Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Allison reassures her.  Stiles walks from the kitchen into the living room, his heart pounding with every step.  

When the room is in full view, he sees a short, pale woman with curly, strawberry blonde hair with her arms wrapped around a notebook.

“Oh my god,” he blurts before he can stop himself.  “Your roommate is Lydia Martin?”

“You’re Stiles,” Lydia says assessingly.  “Allison showed me the video you mentioned her in.”

“You’ve seen my videos,” Stiles says, needing to hear it repeated out loud before he can actually believe it.  He keeps glancing at Scott, sharing looks that transmit desperately that he’s not sure this is real and that he needs Scott’s affirmation that Lydia Martin is standing in his living room, using his name and talking about watching his videos.  Scott looks like he’s fit to burst and Kira looks confused, glancing from person to person, which Stiles takes as a confirmation that he is not dreaming this up.

“I’ve seen one,” Lydia says.  “Allison wanted to talk about your mistakes.”

Lydia’s lack of enthusiasm doesn’t register with Stiles at all.  “I have lots of videos where I don’t make mistakes.  Most of them, actually.  Or, well, just a few, because I play the games and so that comes with dying a few times, you know, but…  you should watch them, if you have time.  I can’t believe you even watched one.  That’s so exciting.”

“I’m a busy person,” Lydia says flatly.  “Speaking of which, now that I have my notebook, I’ll be leaving for class.”

“You don’t have time to stay?” Stiles asks hopefully.  Scott is mouthing something at him that he can’t understand, and Kira’s confused frown is growing more pronounced.  

“I don’t.”  She turns to Allison.  “I’ll be home around 3, and we’ll do face masks and movies tonight.”

Stiles had almost forgotten that Allison was in the room, so when she says, “Awesome, thanks Lydia,” Stiles nearly jumps.  

Lydia gives Allison a quick hug and is out the door, and Stiles is left reeling and trying to piece together exactly what just happened.

 

* * *

 

“So you know Lydia?” Allison messages Stiles later that night.  After Lydia’s visit, Allison hadn’t stayed long, and they didn’t end up really talking about it there.

“We went to grade school, middle school, and high school together.  I’ve had a crush on her almost as long as I’ve been friends with Scott, which is a very long time.”

“She didn’t mention that she knew you,” Allison says.

“She didn’t exactly really notice me, even though I tried really hard.”

“Oh.”

For the first time in a while, the conversation feels stilted and awkward between them.  Stiles isn’t sure why Allison is being weird, so he starts trying to initiate conversation again.  He asks her tons of questions about how Allison knows Lydia and how they became friends and everything else he can think of that falls short of is she dating anyone, which is what he really wants to know.

Allison answers all his questions, but her responses come much more slowly than they usually do, which Stiles thinks is weird.  She explains that she is doing homework, and Stiles accepts that as an explanation before he breaks and asks her if Lydia is dating anyone.

“No, she isn’t.  She hasn’t dated anyone since I’ve known her.  She’s been my roommate since freshman year, and she seems really happy being single.”

“Do you think she’s open to anything?” Stiles asks, not letting that get him down in the face of the possibility of actually dating Lydia Martin.

“I don’t think she is, Stiles.  She’s been going on a lot lately about how society treats being in a relationship as an essential part of a woman’s life.”

“Do you think that’s something you could ask her about, since you’re her roommate and all?”

Stiles has to wait almost a half an hour before Allison finally replies.  “I’ll ask if you really want me to.”

Stiles punches the air.  “Oh my god, you are the absolute best human being on the planet, Allison.  I’ll pay you back for this sometime.”

“You don’t have to pay me back for it.  That’s what friends do, right?”

“Only the best friends, and you’re one of them,” Stiles types in quickly, feeling confident as he presses send.

Allison sends back a thank you and changes the subject quickly.

 

* * *

 

It’s all Stiles can talk about for the next few days.

Scott tried to ask Lydia once, back in high school, if she liked Stiles, but it didn’t go very well, because Lydia paid just about as much attention to Scott as she did to Stiles.  Between Scott’s asthma and Stiles’ panic attacks and ADHD and their collective dorkiness, neither of them was exactly on Lydia’s radar.

Allison, though, is Lydia’s roommate, and from piecing together what Allison said about her roommate from before Stiles realized it was Lydia (it took all night, there was a lot), probably her best friend, too.  Stiles figures that there is no better way to find out if Lydia is open to something (or open to something with him) than to have Allison ask for him.

He doesn’t expect a quick answer, because he knows Allison probably wants to be a bit subtle into dropping it into a conversation, and things like that are not always easy to drop in casually.  He keeps talking to Allison through that time, and he always wants to ask her if she’s said anything to Lydia about him or to ask her more questions about Lydia, but he figures he should calm down for just a bit.  He doesn’t want to be too pushy.

He talks to Scott and Kira about it a lot.  He explains Lydia to Kira, who has heard about her in the vaguest of terms (Stiles’ unattainable crush for forever, it was embarrassing for everyone involved, etc...) but doesn’t know just how big of a deal she was for Stiles for so many years.  She is much less sympathetic than Stiles expects.  She doesn’t say anything really negative, but Stiles is getting concerned vibes, and when Stiles tells her about the time he almost got her to dance with him at the winter dance their sophomore year, Kira looks troubled.  Stiles ignores it and charges onward to talk about how great it is that he’s finally got Lydia’s attention, because that was really what was holding him back, after all.  Now that Lydia’s noticed him, he’s sure that she’ll want to date him, or at least do a little bit of making out.  There’s no way she won’t realize that he is handsome and awesome.  She must realize that, or she would’ve had Allison go take her her notebook, instead of coming to visit Stiles at his place.

Scott, on the other hand, is psyched for Stiles.  He lets Stiles ramble about how Lydia actually knew his name, how she had watched one of his videos even though she probably had no interest in video games and how she _actually remembered his name_.  Scott points out that it’s probably because Allison talks about Stiles a lot, but Stiles insists that, either way, the fact that it stuck in that big, beautiful head of Lydia’s is a good sign.  She came and stood in their apartment when it was not a disgusting mess and when it smelled like the delicious food that Stiles cooked and she recognized Stiles by his face and called him by his name.  That’s more than Stiles has accomplished in the last 12 years, no matter how many times he tried to invite Lydia to his birthday parties and no matter how many times he tried to talk to her.  Scott recognizes that, and Stiles is grateful for it.  There’s someone around, at least, who understands how significant all of this is.  

For the first time in a while, Stiles feels like he actually stands a chance at getting her to like him.  He feels like his whole life has led up to this point.  He may or may not admit that to Allison in one of their late night conversations, when they go down the track of talking about past relationships and Stiles has to admit that he has never been in one because he was waiting for Lydia to notice him.

Allison goes quiet and then says she should go to bed, and Stiles feels like he’s said something wrong, but he can’t put his finger on exactly what it is.

 

* * *

 

“You said that to her?” Kira says, her face pinched.  “Oh, Stiles.”

“What?” Stiles demands.  “It’s true!  Lydia was always like… the ten-year plan, which then turned into the fifteen-year plan.  There was a list of steps that we wrote out.  Getting her to notice me and learn my name was the first one.  I am now on the list and it has been the product of twelve years of work.”

Kira looks even more pained.  “Stiles, I don’t-”

“I thought Allison would get that, she’s my friend,” Stiles interrupts.  Now that he’s on a roll, he can’t stop talking.  He’s starting to get indignant, which worries Kira even more.  “She should be excited for me, like you or Scott.  This is a big fucking deal.”

“Stiles,” Kira says again, tentative but persistent.  “I’m not… exactly excited for you?”

The betrayal Stiles feels stops him cold.  “What do you mean you’re not excited for me?”

“I’m not really all that excited for you,” Kira repeats, her voice strengthening.  Stiles doesn’t think he’s seen her this nervous talking to him about anything since she admitted to him that she liked Scott back in freshman year, and it’s the only thing that’s stopping him from jumping down her throat.  “I… I’m not Scott, and I haven’t been your best friend since you were five.  I wasn’t there for high school with you.  I’m… sort of glad about that, though.”

“Why?”

“You’re absolutely one of my best friends, and I wouldn’t be living with you if I didn’t think you were generally a good dude,” Kira rushes to get out, “but it seems like when it comes to Lydia, you are sort of… not really the nicest person?”

Stiles immediately takes offense.  “What do you mean, I’m the one who isn’t the nicest person?  I liked her for that long and she never paid a single bit of attention to me at all.  I understood her.  I knew she was smart, even when she played dumb for so many years.  No one got that like I did.  I gave her so many chances to see that I understood her, but she never cared about me, because I was… I don’t know, not good enough for her, somehow.”

“Stiles,” Kira starts, her hands folded tightly in her lap, “that is sort of a little bit not okay?”

“I know, that’s what I said!” Stiles says, spurred on by her agreement.  “If she would’ve stopped pretending and given me a little attention...”

Kira jumps in before he can steamroll down an even worse path.  “That’s not what I meant,” she says urgently.  “I meant that maybe what you were doing was a little bit not okay?  I don’t blame her, a little bit, for not wanting to date you.  I’d be sort of creeped out if a guy acted that way.”  

Stiles stares at Kira, his mouth wide open.  No one says anything for a full half a minute, and when Stiles closes his mouth, his cheeks are flushed red and his nostrils are flaring.  “You’d be creeped out,” he says flatly.

“I don’t think you’re creepy, Stiles, but she clearly wasn’t interested,” Kira says gently.  “You were acting like you deserved her, or like you realizing she was smart meant you _knew_ her.  If she was that smart and she was in your class all those years, I’m sure she knew your name, even back then.  If you made that much of an effort to keep shoving yourself at her, she knows who you are, and she probably doesn’t have happy, fuzzy feelings about you.”

“All Lydia needed was a little push in the right direction to realize that she had options,” Stiles says, no less angry.

“From what Allison said, though, she realized that she was happy on her own.  She knew you were an option.  She probably knew she had all the options in the world.  She’s a very, very pretty person,” Kira says.

“So you’re saying that she knew she could go out with me, but she chose not to,” Stiles says flatly.  “You’re saying you think I’m not good enough for Lydia.”

“I think you probably did more harm than good with trying so hard.  I know that’s how you are, Stiles.  You don’t do anything halfway.  Things either get your whole attention or none of it.  Most of the time, there’s nothing wrong with that,” she says quickly, “and it makes you a really, really great friend, most of the time.  You would take a bullet for Scott.  But it seems like Lydia maybe didn’t want that kind of attention, and you were too far down that road to realize it.  I mean…” Kira takes a very, very long pause, and Stiles waits in unhappy, impatient silence.  “Even when Lydia came here the other day, she didn’t seem all that interested, Stiles.  She said she just knew your name because of Allison, and she didn’t want to watch the rest of your videos.”

“Allison just wanted to be a good friend and showed her one-”

“Stiles, Allison didn’t know you liked Lydia then,” Kira cuts him off, heading off any arguments he could make.  “Allison mentioned you to Lydia because Allison likes you, and you’re her friend.  I think she’s probably upset with you because you’ve been blowing off your relationship to talk about Lydia.  When Lydia walked in and you lit up and then totally forgot about her and ignored her even after Lydia left, you should’ve seen her face, Stiles.  She was really hurt.”

“Why would she be hurt?  Lydia’s her friend and I’m her friend.  She should be excited.”

“How would you feel if one of your best friends just started blowing you off, or only talking to you to push you for information.”  Stiles looks chastised for the first time since the conversation started, and Kira continues.  “You asked her to ask Lydia if she was interested in dating you, too, when... I think she might like you, Stiles.”

Stiles just stares at her, jaw set.  “Okay, this conversation just went from insulting to crazy.  I’m out of here.”

Kira says Stiles’ name, but he ignores her.  He gets up and goes to his bedroom, slamming the door behind him.

 

* * *

 

Stiles doesn’t mention it to Allison.

He’s tempted to.  He wants to complain so much about the conversation with Kira, because it’s bugging him, and Allison is who he goes to about things that bug him, these days.  Besides, if he brought it up to Allison, she could quickly dismiss it and tell him that what Kira said was ridiculous and false and they could leave it all behind them.

Something stops him from doing it, though.  Bringing it up to Allison makes him anxious, because talking to Allison is making him realize that maybe there was one thing Kira was right about; he has been talking to Allison about Lydia a lot lately.  He figured it was totally fine and justified, and that Allison doesn’t mind at all.  But then, after Kira mentioned it, when he notices himself mentioning Lydia, he can see how quiet Allison gets.  Stiles doesn’t think that Kira’s explanation for why is right, but her observation of the sequence of events is not false, at all, and Stiles doesn’t want to risk screwing things up.

He’s still mad at Kira, days later.  They haven’t been talking, and Stiles can see that Scott is starting to get worried.  He hates when his favorite people are unhappy, and he hates it even more when they’re unhappy with each other.  He keeps trying to smooth things over, but since he doesn’t seem to actually know what the problem is, it isn’t going very well.

It leads to Scott isolating Stiles in the kitchen one day and flat out asking him, concern in his brown eyes, “Stiles, what’s going on?

“I’m making myself a sandwich,” Stiles tries halfheartedly, and the disappointed look on Scott’s face makes him give up way too easily.  He sighs and runs a hand through his hair.  He considers going straight ahead and blaming it on Kira, but he decides to go about it differently.  He knows that if he asks Scott to be honest with him, Scott would actually do it.

“Scott, do you think that Lydia actually wants to be with me?  Like, not the answer to just make me happy and be my bro.  Do you actually think she likes me?” Stiles asks.

Scott hesitates way too long, which already tells Stiles that this isn’t going to be an answer he wants to hear.  “She’s more interested than when we were kids?” Scott hedges.

“But she doesn’t really want me, does she?” Stiles asks.

With his sympathetic, sad eyes on high, Scott shakes his head.  “She didn’t seem all that interested when she was over here, Stiles.  She knew your name, and she knew who you were, but she mostly just cared a lot about her notebook and making sure Allison was okay.  Allison told you that Lydia’s happy being single, and I think she’s maybe right.”

“Kira tried to tell me that, too,” Stiles admits.  His chest is tight, and he wants to cry or nap or both.  It’s one thing to hear it from one person, but to hear it from Scott too makes it pretty much guaranteed to be true.  “She said a lot of things, and I thought she was being really mean and not making much sense.  I didn’t know what the hell was going on, because she doesn’t really have any meanness in her.  She’s not like me that way, and I didn’t get why she was saying any of that stuff.”

“What else did she say?” Scott prompts.

“She said that when it comes to Lydia, I’m not very nice, and that me going after Lydia for that many years was kind of creepy, because she didn’t want me.  She said that I was not being a good friend to Allison, only using her to pump her for information about Lydia.”  Stiles frowns.  “The most confusing bit was when she tried to say that Allison likes me.”

“That’s a lot,” Scott agrees, wrapping his arm around Stiles and squeezing him in a one-arm hug.  “You’re right.”

“Do you think she’s right?” Stiles asks quietly, tense against Scott’s body.

“About what part?”

“All of it?” Stiles asks ruefully.

Scott laughs, and Stiles finally relaxes into Scott.  Stiles towers over Scott, but having Scott’s arm around him and being able to just melt into him soothes some of the hurt that’s bubbling up in his chest.  “Yeah,” Scott says gently.  “It doesn’t sound nice when you say it all that way, but my girlfriend’s pretty smart.”

It hurts about as much as Stiles expects.  “Even with the Allison thing?” Stiles presses.

“Even with the Allison thing,” Scott agrees.  “I don’t know her like I know you, but she seems like she likes you, Stiles, and you might want to sit down and take a look at how you feel, too.”

“I don’t…”

Scott squeezes tightly.  “She’s not Lydia, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.  There are other women in the world.  Allison’s a good one, and I think you’ve already noticed that.”

Stiles sighs.  “I’m gonna have too much to think about tonight.”

“You can do it,” Scott says confidently.  “But I think before then, there’s probably someone you should talk to.”

“Is she in her room?”

Scott lets go of him.  “Yeah, she is.”

“Okay,” Stiles says.  “I’ll go talk to her.”

 

* * *

 

The next few weeks are very interesting for Stiles.

That night, he sits on Kira and Scott’s bed and talks to them until almost 3 AM.  He works things through with Kira; he admits that she was right about a lot, and that she probably couldn’t have said it any more nicely than she did and still actually get through to him.  They hug it out, which is a visible relief to Scott and makes Stiles feel ten times better.  He can hold a grudge and draw out avoiding people for ages, but it’s upsetting to him when it’s someone he actually cares about, like Kira.  Being around the apartment and not being able to gush about the brand new episode of Agent Carter, even, sucked a lot.

He has a new plan to replace the fifteen-year plan.  He and Scott symbolically burn the list of steps to the plan with a lighter behind their building, and while Stiles wouldn’t say that it was cathartic, he would say it feels like a step in the right direction.  He’s been working extra hard to figure out how to sort his head out, although it feels really, really ridiculous in hindsight having to try and sort through so many feelings about someone who he was never actually really with.  Kira tells him that it’s probably getting over his built-in plan for getting Lydia and his well-developed mental image of who he thought Lydia was that is so hard for him.  He’s dealing with giving up something he’s held constant for a long time.

The good thing about it is that it isn’t something he has to actively think about a lot.  It isn’t like Lydia was really a big part of his everyday life in the first place.  He has to check himself when he stares at Lydia in chemistry, but that’s really a minor change.  He works at seriously cutting down his conversations with Allison about Lydia and going back to the kind of conversations they used to have before.  What Scott says keeps playing in the back of his mind when they talk, and he tries not to focus too much on that either, but it’s always there, making him wonder and reinterpret everything and poke at it in his head.  Allison seems much happier now that he’s laid off the Lydia stuff, and when she brings up Lydia, now, it’s much more casual and unforced.  Their conversations as a whole feel less forced, which is really nice.  Allison asks him to go to lunch for the first time in a while, instead of him asking her to.

When they’re together, Stiles can’t help but notice himself staring at her hands and her mouth when she talks or the way her hair moves when she walks or the way her eyes sparkle when she laughs.  It’s all stuff that Stiles has noticed before, things that he’s internalized as being as much Allison as her inability to do homework late at night and her genuine concern for his health and wellbeing and her quick, sharp comebacks that she only started sharing once he got to know her better.  It makes Stiles weak and it sends his mind back to cycling around the question of how it actually feels to like someone in a way that isn’t like with Lydia.

Grinning from ear to ear as Allison teases him, Stiles wonders if maybe if it feels just like this.

 

* * *

 

Allison comes over to Stiles’ place to crash for a bit.  They’re both worn down from tests and papers, and Scott and Kira went out on a date, so it’s just the two of them relaxing and eating takeout.  Allison says she wants to play a videogame with Stiles (“one of those games where you shoot people”), and although it takes her some time to figure out the controller, she gets good at it way more quickly than Stiles thinks is fair.  He would hate to see what she would look like playing with one of the fake gun controllers; he thinks that she’d be a force to be reckoned with, even with so little experience.

The two of them end up huddled close on the living room floor with Allison’s legs sprawled on Stiles’.  Stiles is aware of the heat of her body against his at every single point of contact.  His mouth is dry over something as innocuous as touching calves.  He feels like he fits in one of those English old-timey periods where calves were super risque, except he isn’t turned on, just noticing it.  

Okay, maybe a little bit turned on.

They’ve had a lot more moments like this lately, where Stiles feels calm and relaxed and settled and less like he wants to crawl out of his own skin when he has to try and sit still.  Allison is pretty and smart and keeps him occupied, mentally and physically, which is more than three quarters of the battle.  More and more, they’re becoming comfortable with touch, which is pretty great for Stiles, since he is such a tactile person.

They finish up a game, which Stiles wins by the skin of his teeth, and he sets the controller down.  “I think you’re actually good at everything, you know.  I think you’re pretty unfair.”

Allison laughs.  “It’s probably just beginner’s luck,” she says, which Stiles knows she doesn’t actually believe and is only saying to placate him.  He appreciates the effort all the same.

“We’ll have to do this again sometime and test that out,” Stiles tells her, smiling.  “We’ll try other games, too.  There has to be something I can kick your ass at.”

“We’ll see about that.”  Allison nudges him with her elbow, and Stiles nudges her back.  She laughs and puts her controller down, too, leaning back against the couch next to Stiles.  “You know, you’ve been looking a lot happier lately.”

“I have?”

“Yeah,” Allison agrees.  “I haven’t quite figured out why yet, but you’ve definitely seemed happier lately.  Not that you were sad before.  Just stressed, I think.”

Stiles agrees.  “Things have been good for me, lately.  I’ve been working on myself a lot more than I have in a long time.  I realized some things, and it’s had me doing a bit of an overhaul.”

“What’d you notice?”

It’s a perfectly reasonable question for Allison to ask.  This is the kind of stuff they tell each other all the time.  Stiles is tempted to change the subject or to dodge the conversation or to downright lie, but he decides that now is as good of a time as any to get this stuff out.  “My whole crush on Lydia thing needed some serious downsizing, because it was a little bit obsessive and unhealthy and affecting things with you.”

That clearly wasn’t what Allison was expecting to hear.  She processes for a moment.  “You changed things because it was affecting your relationship with me?”

“Yeah,” Stiles agrees.  “I mean, I don’t really know Lydia.  I’ve had myself convinced for a very long time that I did, and that was wrong.  Lydia isn’t a part of my life.  But you are, and you are really important to me, and I was fucking up.  I was fucking up a lot.”

“You were,” Allison agrees.  “You asked me to ask her if she was interested in dating.”

“At the time, it seemed like a totally legit thing to ask!” Stiles insists.  “In hindsight, maybe not so much.”

“Hindsight is 20-20,” Allison says.

“Yeah.  I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, and there was a lot going on there that was mixed up or not great.  I’m sorry about that.  I was sort of shitty.”

Allison smiles gently.  “You’re working on it, right?”

“I am,” Stiles confirms.

“Then I forgive you,” Allison says, pulling Stiles into a hug.  “How’d you figure out you needed to fix some things?”

“Kira, mostly,” Stiles answers.  “She sat me down and told me all of the things I wasn’t noticing.”

That makes Allison still.  “Like what?”

“There was a lot of stuff.  Most of it wasn’t very fun to hear.  Stuff like implying that maybe my crush on Lydia was not the healthiest and saying I was being terrible to you.”  Stiles pauses for a moment and looks at Allison.  She is warm and soft against him and she’s ridiculously capable and hot and obviously concerned about him because she’s a good human being and she likes him and wants the best for him.  Stiles knows that he likes her and wants the best for her, too.  So after a long moment of silence, he decides to go for it.  “And that maybe there was a reason that you were so hurt by me asking stuff about Lydia and her interest in me.”

Allison’s facial expression doesn’t change at all, and Stiles can feel nerves bubbling up in his gut.  “What reason?”

“She said you liked me.  And then Scott told me I want to take some time looking at my feelings, too.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah,” Stiles says.  Although it’s tempting to look down and shy away from saying it, he keeps his head up and looks Allison in the eyes.  He’s scared shitless, but he wants to tell her to her face, instead of mumbling it to her shoes.  “And if he and Kira are right, and you do like me, then you should know you aren’t really alone there.  As in, like.  I like you, not as in I like me too.”

Allison’s face splits into a bright smile.  “I like you, too, Stiles.”

There’s a moment of silence for Stiles to process that.  

“Holy shit,” Stiles blurts, stunned.  “I so did not expect that to go so well.  Holy shit.  You actually like me?  You like me and I like you back?”

Allison is practically giggling.  “Actual requited crushes are new for you, I know.  So, if you want, I can handle asking you out the first time, and you can take your turn after that?”

Stiles could honestly kiss her right there and then.  “You pick the time and place and I’m totally there.”

“Clear your schedule this Saturday, then,” Allison tells him.  

 

* * *

 

Stiles has no idea what he was expecting when he decided to let Allison pick the date.  He thought maybe it might be lunch and a movie, or something, maybe going bowling.  What he didn’t expect is to be walking to the university sports center at 9 AM.

“It’ll be worth it, trust me,” was all Allison gave him to work with, though she did tell him that he didn’t have to wear workout clothes, so he suspects that her plan is not to get him hot and sweaty on the first date.  He hasn’t worked out since high school, and he wasn’t very good about doing it regularly then.  Now, he’s horribly out of shape and would actually melt into a puddle of embarrassment and humiliation and sore limbs.

When they swipe in, Allison leads him downstairs and walks up to a desk.  She chats with the guy behind it for about five minutes before he promises he’ll be right back and disappears through a door.  Allison waits expectantly, but Stiles is just more confused.

A few minutes later, the guy returns with a key.  “Here you go, the room’s all just how you left it.”

Allison beams at him.  “Thanks, Danny.  I’ll have it back in an hour or so.”

“Take your time, don’t worry about it.”

Allison grabs the key and leads Stiles to a small room at the end of the hallway.  When she unlocks the door, it finally clicks where they are.

All of Allison’s video recording equipment is already set up.  Apparently she reserved the room and set it up that morning.

“Holy shit,” Stiles says.  “You’re going to let me watch you film?”

Allison grins.  “Even better.  I had an idea.”

Stiles can already tell that this is going to be a fantastic first date.

 

* * *

 

In the middle of the now-familiar gym room, Allison kicks off the video.  “Hey everyone.  Today I’ve got something really fun planned for you that I can hopefully keep going in future videos.  My regular viewers know that I responded a few months ago to a video made by Stiles talking about mixed martial arts and self-defense moves showing up in videogames, and I got a lot of positive responses.  Stiles and I started talking, and we liked the idea of working together on a project sort of like that.  Every once in a while, he’s going to pick out a move from whatever game he’s playing through at the time, and then we’re going to have fun researching it and learning it so that we can teach you all about it and how to do it.  He’s been playing this last game for a while, because he’s a slowpoke-”

“Hey!” Stiles says, forgetting for a moment that the camera is on, and Allison giggles.  “Because he’s a slowpoke,” she repeats, a grin on her face.  “So I decided that to start off, I’m going to pick my favorite button mash from the game.  I actually played this one!”

“She was unfairly good at it,” Stiles says, “but she played on two player and not adventure mode, so it doesn’t count.”

“You know, if you’re going to talk, you might as well come out here so they can see you,” Allison says, and Stiles grins and walks over.  

“Hey guys,” he says to the camera.  “I’m not exactly camera-ready, Allison sprung this one on me.  But if I know what she’s planning, it looks like you guys are going to see me eat mat today.”

“Just what you always wanted,” Allison teases, addressing the camera.

Stiles kisses her on the cheek.  “Yeah.  Just what I always wanted.”

(When it comes time to edit, even Stiles doesn’t suggest cutting it.)

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr [here](sleepy-skittles.tumblr.com)


End file.
